We were on our way home from the airport a week ago at a quite late hour with all three of us utterly exhausted when he realized in horror what he’d left on the plane. He got out his phone and filed a report. We expected never to see it again.

My phone, not his, got a voice mail yesterday–go figure. Maybe because the flight had been booked with my name first? Southwest’s baggage claim had it. Would we like to come pick it up.

YES!

Michelle drove, I came with. She ran in to retrieve it; being able to hear in a noisy airport is a good idea.

And so I got out, walked around the car, and sat in the driver’s seat, expecting to be told at any moment to move along.

If you’ve ever priced portable cpap machines (it was out of pocket) you know why it turned out to have been locked away among the valuables. That required the supervisor, who had stepped away moments before we pulled in and was suddenly nowhere to be found.

I was a ways past the last door out of the building, facing the longterm parking, and it was the least busy I have ever seen that terminal. Nobody would want to pick up their person from where I was if they didn’t have to. And they didn’t.

At long last one of the traffic enforcers walked up to my window. I told him what we were doing, and that if he needed me to circle around the airport awhile I’d be happy to. He nodded, looked down the road behind me to gauge how much in the way I was–ie, not at all–and told me that if arrivals picked up I’d need to move on but for now, *shrug*, and with that he turned and walked back towards where incoming cars would actually want to be.

She came out the door at long last, cpap triumphantly in hand, we switched places again and she drove away as I wondered how much being a white-haired older woman in an old car had played into all that. Maybe the guy wishes his folks would give up the keys: maybe he didn’t want me on the road when I’d had the good sense to let my kid drive me there. Maybe he just saw a chance to be nice when it didn’t hurt anything to.

We were trying to get every minute out of the visit before she flies home tomorrow.

A huge thank you to Southwest for tracking down that machine and getting it back to our airport and us. The writing on the ID tag had rubbed off.

The info is back on it now.

(Edit: he just showed me the covid vaccine card with his name on it in a zip pocket. So it did have that to confirm it for them. Good.)